#
Before you listen to this episode of The Scene in the Unseen, I have a recommendation for
#
Do check out Pulya Baazi, hosted by Saurabh Chandra and Pranay Kutasane, two really good
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Kickass podcast in Hindi.
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Liberals, progressives, conservatives, libertarians, I have a problem with these labels.
#
In fact, I have four problems with these labels.
#
Problem one, they have changed meaning over time.
#
The word liberal meant one thing in the 19th century and means quite another in the 21st.
#
And it means different things in different parts of the world.
#
For example, American liberals often have the opposite beliefs to European liberals
#
and classical liberals and left liberals are often at loggerheads with one another.
#
Problem two, the proper nouns often do not mean what the common noun does.
#
For example, I meet too many liberals who are anything but liberal.
#
So many progressives are certainly not progressive and many conservatives are actually quite
#
Problem three, these labels have acquired a tribal significance.
#
And if you call yourself say libertarian, it is held as meaning that you belong to a
#
tribe of people who call themselves libertarian and not that you believe in a certain set
#
And you then become part of the tribal warfare between liberals and conservatives and progressives
#
And the discussion becomes heated and personal degenerating to abuse rather than calm and
#
rational revolving around values.
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Problem four, these labels are meaningless in an Indian context.
#
Politics in India is not divided in a left right spectrum as it is in the West and identity
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politics dominates here.
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Though I did explore in episode 131 of the scene in the unseen, the theory that ideological
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fault lines do exist in Indian politics, but around different issues than in the West.
#
And yet here I am doing an episode called the Indian conservative.
#
Well, here's the thing, the scene in the unseen is basically driven by my intellectual curiosity
#
about ideas and events.
#
And over the last few months, I have been re-examining a prior belief I held about India
#
that there was no such thing as conservatism in India.
#
I held the view that conservatism as it is in the West, say Burkian conservatism was
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missing in India and that the term conservative was used as a respectable fig leaf by communal
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bigots who were simply indulging in identity politics.
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This is partly true, but I've come to realize that it's a simplistic view and that there
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have been strains of conservative thought in India.
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And if we want to understand this country as it is today, we need to engage with it
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seriously and respectfully.
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My intellectual journey on the subject is partly taken place in public through various
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episodes of the scene in the unseen in which I've spoken to guests like Agar Patel, Suyash
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Rai, Rahul Verma, and Akshay Mukul.
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Today I take one more step in that journey with a fine author who has written an erudite
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book called the Indian conservative, which is therefore the subject of this episode and
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of my continuing exploration of the hidden currents that drive our great nation.
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Welcome to the scene and the unseen.
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Our weekly podcast on economics, politics, and behavioral science.
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Please welcome your host Amit Bhatma.
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Welcome to the scene and the unseen.
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My guest today is Jai Theeth Rao, better known as Jerry Rao, who made his fortune as an IT
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entrepreneur and his name as a columnist in various national newspapers over a couple
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I thoroughly enjoyed reading his book, the Indian conservative, which defines conservatism
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locates it in India's own traditions rather than just to Western thought and proposes
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and maps out two major strains of Indian conservatism in a formulation that was both new and thought
#
The conversation you'll hear now is both combative and respectful, which brings me to an aside
#
about a criticism some have leveled at me that I do not invite guests who I disagree
#
This is an absurd criticism because I have had disagreements with every single guest
#
I've had on the show, but always expressed in a civil way.
#
Listeners used to the with operative violence of social media may not even have realized
#
that an argument was underway.
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This particular conversation was a great fun for both Jerry and me.
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But before we go there, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Jerry, welcome to the scene and the unseen.
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Thank you so much, Amit.
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Before we get down to talking about your book, the Indian conservative, which I greatly enjoyed
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reading, very thought provoking.
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Let's first talk a little bit about your personal journey.
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Like what makes Jerry Rao, Jerry Rao?
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Well I guess relatively standard kind of Indian middle class background on the fifties, sixties,
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My father was an official in the government and he got transferred from place to place
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and we as a family moved with him from place to place.
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We are South Indian originally from the state of Tamil Nadu, but we are not Tamilians.
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We are Kannada speaking people.
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My family roots go back to Coimbatore and but for more than a hundred years now, 120
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years, we've been in Madras.
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So Madras is where I finished school and did my college.
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So that kind of gives you a smattering of Hindi, a smattering of Tamil, a smattering
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of Kannada and pretty much otherwise English is the way and a little bit of Sanskrit too
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But that's pretty much the way one's linguistic narrative, if you will, bands out.
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We have a family, very traditional religious.
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Every single religious festival occasion was observed, visited lots of temples as a child
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So from that perspective, very much rooted in things Indian.
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Also in things of the Raj because my grandfathers, both of them were very much into English literature
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and so and into an appreciation of the finer things of the British Raj.
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So that too came through in the stuff.
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Oddly enough, oddly enough, since you ask, one of the incidents that I've been remembering
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recently in different contexts is when our family went to Bhakra in 60, I think, and
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the dam was still being built and my father, I remember telling us, look what a grand thing
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Panditji is building for us.
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So there was that whole sense of the 1960s effervescent patriotism, the looking forward
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to a great future and all that and pride and all that.
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So that too was very much part of my upbringing.
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After that, after college, I went to business school, went to Ahmedabad, Ahmedabad, then
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got into banking and went around the world, then took a couple of years off, went back
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to university at the University of Chicago, then came back into banking, spent a lot of
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years in banking, about 25 years.
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Left in California in 1998 and went into IT, that was a 10 year stint in IT, then we sold
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off our company and then I moved on.
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And since then, I've been an investor in a variety of companies, including a housing
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finance company, which I exited some time back and a housing development company where
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I'm still involved as a promoter.
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And what's your intellectual journey through this period like, like you had mentioned when
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we had coffee before this, that you were a socialist in college.
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What was that journey like?
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Was it that you were, you know, you did your MBA and you're out in the real world and you're
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I think definitely the socialist thing was very strong in my college days.
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I would say age 16 through 20 time period.
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It was also remember the time when Vietnam War protests were taking place all over the
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world, including in sleepy Madras and the Berkeley and Paris and all these things were
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very much part of the, the consciousness of people like us.
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Even in India, we had a charismatic leader who was nationalizing banks and troubling
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So there was a, there was that wave of, of popular socialist feeling, which was very
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much part of my consciousness and my, my interest.
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And I've written a poem somewhere where I mentioned the fact that when we were young,
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we read Lenin state and revolution kind of tells you something about the nature of the
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So over, I think it is not just MBA and so on.
#
It is over the years, gradually with greater exposure to different kinds of texts, different
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kinds of people that conservatism first, it was actually on the economic side, a movement
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towards markets as being more consequentially efficient.
#
But then I would say in the last 30 odd years, it's been or 25 years, it's been more from
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the moral side as to what, what is appropriate for human beings that the, the intellectual
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journey has, has taken place the way it has.
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To some extent, I think constantly reinforced by the fact that at least for the last 20
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odd years, yeah, no, maybe 25 years, I've been doing a lot of pilgrimages and temple
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visits and that somehow tends to reinforce a certain idea of India and a certain idea
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of what it is that one needs to conserve about India, about our own society and therefore
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what one needs to conserve about human beings in general.
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And who are the sort of thinkers who influenced you?
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Like are there any, like one question I often ask my guests is that, is there any book which
#
changed the way you look at the world, which is perhaps a little simplistic, they often
#
won't be just one book, there'll be multiple books, but if I were to pose that to you?
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I think the, the most important influence both from an aesthetic and a, and a, and a
#
kind of moral perspective is T. S. Eliot, because I think the development of Eliot between
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wasteland and journey of the major, which is my favorite poem, I read it at least once
#
or twice a month, sometimes aloud, and for quartets kind of established for me that there
#
is continuity in what we as human beings do and to snap that thread of continuity and
#
to kind of do something radical or revolutionary and break down and try to build anew is something
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that I've started detesting quite a bit.
#
So I would say Eliot, initially, Eliot was a shock, as what Hugh Hefner says is a neurasthenic
#
shock of reading Profrock.
#
But over time, Eliot was not, I remember once going to London and I visited St. Mary Willnot
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I went down King William Street to where St. Mary Willnot kept the hour, it's in wasteland.
#
And then I went to the other church where there's Ionian white and gold.
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And then one started getting a feel that, that in, in seeking to maintain continuity
#
with tradition, Eliot was trying to give us an extremely important lesson about, and he
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does it, of course, in the aesthetic literary world.
#
But I think it's equally applicable in the political, social, aesthetic worlds.
#
And the second influence, I would say, is Smith, Adam Smith, the early Smith.
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Theory of moral sentiments.
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And this I never knew about it, frankly.
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I, like everyone else, one read or one skimmed through Wealth of Nations and used quoted
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That's the way standard economics 101 works.
#
But several years ago, ten, fifteen years ago, I was at a longish meeting with Professor
#
Amartya Sen when he kind of directed me to go and read Theory of Moral Sentiments, which
#
subsequently, of course, I did.
#
And it opened up the fact that it was published a decade earlier than the Wealth of Nations
#
And in fact, there's a foundation for the later capitalism that Smith developed, struck
#
Again, this whole thing that ideas evolve, that is, Bacon says something, somebody else
#
says something, you build on what Bacon says, you know, it's not it's not something that
#
comes in a sui generis at one particular point in time.
#
So that's the thing that I kind of saw in Smith's evolution and that there is a moral
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purpose to markets, which is much more than the consequentialist efficiency, which the
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butcher Baker quotation talks about.
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I would say in recent times in the last 10 years, Scruton, Roger Scruton, Roger Scruton
#
has been important because he's defending a society which is actually I wrote this about
#
You can go back and look at one of the essays I wrote in the Indian Express several years
#
ago when I was talking about Nepal, comparing him where he is talking about the decline
#
of modern civilization, particularly Western civilization, comparing him to a kind of Latin
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epigramist living in Tuscany in the year 409 AD, one year before Rome was sacked by Alaric.
#
So there's this sense of foreboding that Nepal as a great conservative has that in not preserving
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and in not building on what we have inherited from humans and trying to jettison that, we
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And Scruton is very much at the center of that, at least as far as England is concerned,
#
because the Church of England is in decline, church music is in decline, Shakespeare is
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no longer fashionable, people don't care about common law, all the things that matter to
#
keeping the English traditions going are what Scruton talks about.
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But it's not completely dead.
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The important thing is they're in decline, they're under assault, but I think they'll
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And there is a sense of optimism also, if you see in my book, at the end of it, that
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it's not completely over.
#
John Major made a very interesting statement, I think, which the cricket commentator John
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Arlott died, Major said, English summers will never be the same again.
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It's a way of kind of keeping in touch with, and to some extent, conservatism is an outlook,
#
it's an approach, it's less an ideology.
#
What I'm then going to do, since you brought Scruton up, is I'm actually going to quote
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from one of his recent books on conservatism.
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And I have a question for you based on that.
#
I mean, I initially thought that we'll talk about the roots of conservatism, starting
#
from Burke onwards, and we'll get to that right after this.
#
Since you brought up Scruton, he makes a point in his book, which is a point that you have
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also made at length in yours, which is, I'll quote him, conservatism is not by nature and
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It takes its character from local questions and the loves and suspicions that thrive in
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specific places and times.
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Stop quote, and then he goes on to say, conservatives believe, quote, the root of politics is settlement.
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This is, he's put in italics, settlement, the motive in human beings that binds them
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to the place, the customs, the history, and the people that are theirs.
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And these concerns come out in what you just said about how English culture is declining
#
in these various ways you pointed out, but that is a lament, which it also seems to me
#
it might be said, it's a two part, it's one observation and a question.
#
And the observation is it might be said that that is a lament of Scruton and people like
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him is not necessarily a lament of England, because England itself has changed, partly
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through immigration, much as America has been completely transformed through immigration.
#
And the danger that a conservative might make there is hold on to a notion of it, which
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And just because they value a particular aspect of it doesn't mean that others who come from
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different traditions necessarily do.
#
And my question really is about the local nature of conservatism, as you stress.
#
And through most of history, individuals have had one geography.
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That's the place around them, the town where they live or whatever, it's a physical geography.
#
But today it could be said that we all inhabit many different geographies that are not bound
#
Like my neighbors are not just those who live in the flat next door in Bombay, but they
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are also people who are on the same WhatsApp group with me from across the world or whatever.
#
And therefore my traditions are not just the traditions I imbibe from the physical spaces
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around me or the physical culture in those physical spaces, but also from the whole globe,
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I mean, with what technology has done.
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So as a conservative, how do you respond to that?
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Yeah, of all the things you've said, the one word that I would kind of really object to
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is the word archaic, which is said in a kind of derogatory manner.
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I'm not saying it's archaic.
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I'm saying it might be archaic.
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That's what I meant, just to clarify.
#
The Magna Carta is archaic, Shakespeare is archaic, Handel is archaic.
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So do we therefore, very soon the Beatles may be seen as archaic.
#
So do we therefore jettison?
#
And this is why I started with Eliot.
#
Eliot goes back to Dunn, he goes back to earlier metaphysical poets, goes back to Dante.
#
And in fact, he goes back all the way to Bradharanyaka Upanishad to go back to the kind of human
#
continuity, the chain of continuity where there's a gradual development evolution.
#
So I think yes, England is changing.
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England is not today what it was 500 years ago, 100 years ago it was not what it was
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Nobody is saying that there is no change.
#
The only concern is in the course of change, are we abandoning good things?
#
If we abandon bad things, that's perfectly fine with conservatives, as Israeli, as Burke,
#
as Scruton have all said in different contexts.
#
But if we give up, who will be the loser if we give up?
#
If tomorrow we are no longer able to sing Tyagaraja Kritis in the ragas that he composed
#
them in, who is the loser?
#
You can say, hey, that's archaic.
#
But our view is, hey, it's worth defending.
#
By calling it archaic, you can't dismiss it.
#
In fact, we think the old has a special value.
#
What was the second question you were asking around that?
#
Let me sort of respond to this to clarify sort of what I meant.
#
I'm not again talking about reform and political changes and so on.
#
Just in the realm of culture, for example, let's say that the Englishman I'm thinking
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of is a second generation Bangladeshi immigrant.
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His parents immigrated to London or Suffolk or wherever.
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They set up a restaurant.
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Sorry, that's a stereotype.
#
He does whatever there, but he considers himself English.
#
He's born and brought up in England.
#
He'll even cheer for the England cricket team, but he doesn't listen to Handel.
#
Maybe he listens to Pavan Das Ball, right?
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Or he listens to whatever he wants to, which is a question of individual choice.
#
And maybe in a certain sense, he's a cultural conservative that he's preserving those elements
#
And therefore, from that point of view, it could be argued that your scrutons lament
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that Handel is not being listened to is perfectly legitimate as a personal lament.
#
But can it be a lament on behalf of society itself?
#
I think the Bangladeshi immigrant who is now an English person would actually be better
#
off, is my personal view, not forgetting the Baul music at all, but by greater acquaintanceship
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with Handel because he is living in a country to which Handel is given so much.
#
And I think that is important.
#
For instance, you and I live in what's now called Mumbai, used to be called Bombay.
#
I think it only helps us to be sensitive, enthusiastic, involved in Ganpati festivals
#
or in the Varkari annual pilgrimage because we are here.
#
It doesn't mean you forget whatever Hindi literature you're acquainted with, or I forget
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Tamil or Kannada, but it behooves us to scrutinize point to be part of the landscape where we
#
And I think this is an important, yes, and the landscape changes.
#
I'm not saying it doesn't change.
#
Bombay was Kalachuri, then it was Adil Shahi, then it was Mogul maybe for some time, then
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it was Portuguese, and it was British, and now it's free India.
#
But that doesn't mean that certain things, for instance, if you do live here, to be enchanted
#
by Elephanta, by the Mahesha Murthy there, I think is part, I can't simply say, oh,
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I've come from a foreign place, I'm only going to be interested in things thousand
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And that's the point that scrutinize making, that in not associating with a, and your point
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you made, I'll come back to that, the virtual and the physical, yes, conservatives are very
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We are very much into landscapes, forests.
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I wrote many years ago that if you don't love water bodies, lakes, rivers, waterfalls, forests,
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mountains, hills, then you don't love India because that's what the country is all about.
#
So the physical thing is extremely important.
#
And I think conservatives would feel profoundly, profoundly anxious if somebody is going to
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spend the whole day sitting on a laptop talking to people thousands of miles away digitally
#
and not be concerned much about the physical landscape around him or her.
#
So yes, the digital world is real.
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You can't run away from it, but we would hope that it would be a balance and a return to
#
appreciating the immediate physical.
#
Let's kind of get back on track and talk a little bit about Burke.
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What does conservatism mean to you?
#
And you know, okay, Burke, you know, is always, everybody calls himself a Burkian conservatism,
#
and Burke is always quoted, I even mentioned somewhere in the book that Ambedkar quoted
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Burke in his great speech in our constituent assembly.
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The reason Burke is fascinating is that he called it right on the French Revolution.
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He said that this is going to result in a military dictatorship sooner or later.
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This is going to result in a permanent hundred year wound on the French psych.
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You're destroying Notre Dame Cathedral and calling it temple of reason.
#
You're really making breaks in the continuous change of French culture going back to, you
#
know, French and country of France is more than 1066 English talk, 1066 France is, or
#
I think, 480 or something, there's continuity there.
#
And exactly what happened, you've got Napoleon and you've got a military dictatorship and
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you have got an imperialist war machine and the wounds that the French have inflicted
#
on themselves have remained.
#
He called it right on the American colonies.
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Strangely enough, you would think he would, being conservatist, oppose their independence.
#
In fact, he took the other position.
#
He said, these people have left England in order to live as colonists and we have given
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Commonwealth of Massachusetts has a charter, Commonwealth of New York has a charter and
#
now you're violating that charter by imposing taxes, by doing stuff.
#
And he called it right on India.
#
That I never knew till I read O'Brien.
#
O'Brien has a whole chapter on this because not everybody knows about Burke's impeachment
#
of Warren Hastings and that, that he was therefore opposed to the perfidies and the excesses
#
and the plunder involved in harassing the Begums of Oud or the Raja of Banaras Jait Singh
#
But the fact that Burke had some very concrete ideas on India.
#
First of all, he said this silly thing that we can break everything in India and not pay
#
attention to their traditions is ridiculous.
#
He said that's a recipe for disaster.
#
And sure enough, that's what happened when we had the 1857 uprising, when you kind of
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ignored the traditions of the country.
#
Two, he was in favor of directly the House of Commons supervising India.
#
He didn't like this idea of the king and the prime minister having your secretary of state
#
for India and certainly he didn't like the idea of a company, East India Company running
#
And if that had happened, imagine if you had had five or 10 parliamentary commissioners
#
supervising the India office in London and through them, the governor-general here, etc.
#
They would have been answerable to local public opinion in England.
#
They would have been en courant with changes.
#
Whereas what happened subsequently in India was an ICS officer would come and stay here
#
So he would only be acquainted with the intellectual currents of 30 years earlier.
#
He didn't know what was changing, forget intellectual currents, even technological, any changes
#
that are taking place in the world.
#
So we got a kind of a frozen bureaucracy and one that was very heavy handed, the rule to
#
the secretary of state, which was a cabinet office.
#
And George III actually hand pit opposed Burke because they wanted to keep the patronage
#
They didn't want to give it over to the parliamentary commissioners, which was a pity.
#
So Burke had thought through some of these things, even vis-a-vis India, with great patience
#
and with great, you know, kind of intellectual agility.
#
So when I read Oberoi and then I went back and I went to my favorite bookshop in New
#
York, Agassiz, and got the complete works of Burke, which I have with me, and started
#
reading here and there in different bits and pieces.
#
And one started understanding that this man was not a bacon or a lock.
#
He was not a philosopher in that sense.
#
He was more of a practical, empirical guy saying, hey, this doesn't make much sense
#
what you're trying to do.
#
This is not a very noble thing that you're trying to do.
#
I mean, that's the way he approached discussions.
#
Then when I read Nicholas Philipson's book on Adam Smith, I came across a brilliant thing
#
which I hadn't come across earlier, which was in, I think, what he reviewed at Edinburgh
#
Review, Burke reviewed Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments, book review.
#
And this Philipson quotes extensively, Nicholas Philipson quotes extensively in his book.
#
And that's where I came across this expression, wisdom of the swain.
#
You know, Burke basically said, hey, common people are wise.
#
This idea that these intellectuals sitting in Oxford Cambridge are wise and common people
#
are stupid or something.
#
And it's a very continental idea.
#
The professor in France or Germany has supreme knowledge and the peasants don't know anything
#
And it's very much opposed to the Burkean conservative view.
#
So let me try and summarize Burke's central insight and tell me if I've got it right,
#
which is, I mean, an insight I more or less agree with, which is that traditions and ways
#
of behavior of a place evolve for certain reasons because they are concomitant with
#
human nature, because they reflect what works and what doesn't work.
#
And if we are to make a radical shift from this, you know, it causes a violence in society
#
that can lead to trouble, much as the French revolution did.
#
And therefore Burke's point is that change is by all means good.
#
Let's stick to what's good about the past.
#
Let's discard what is bad about the past, but let's change gradually and not cause these
#
fundamental shocks in these locations.
#
And like you sum it up, I'll quote you now from your book, quote in our view, by which
#
you mean in conservatives view, quote in our view, the principle challenged faced by societies
#
is how to change constructively without losing things of value in the process of change.
#
Therefore in principle, we are opposed to revolutionary change, preferring the evolutionary
#
That's a, that's a correct.
#
You see the, nobody is saying that because there was slavery in the past, we should continue
#
Now that is for sure, or you know, or burning of women or dowry, whatever there are, there
#
are innumerable things that have to change.
#
The question is when you do something abruptly and when you do something wholesale, first
#
of all, there's violence, which has unintended consequences, usually which are bad.
#
Very rarely does violence have unintended consequences, which are good.
#
Usually you lose the good things associated with the past.
#
And that's the concern that constantly bothers conservatives is that.
#
And that's why it's in my book later on, I say it, the best thing that happened to us
#
was the way our independence happened for three years.
#
He actually remained a dominion.
#
We didn't even become a Republic.
#
It took place gradually evolutionary step by step by step.
#
It didn't happen, whereas in 1917 in Russia or 1949 in China, it happened of a better
#
civil war with great violence and with a complete rupture with the past.
#
You kill off the entire king and his entire royal family in brutal manner and all that
#
In the long run, it actually hurt those societies.
#
And by writing our constitution in English, by using the Government of India Act of 1935
#
as the basis, by accepting principles of English common law as a basis, Indian constitution
#
is by the way, is the only constitution in the world which has a specific article which
#
allows the Supreme Court to intervene in the interests of equity.
#
When the letter of the law doesn't achieve equity, the Supreme Court can intervene.
#
Equity is a very basic seven, 800-year-old English common law concept.
#
So we've kept the traditions of the Raj and we've built on it.
#
Now we've changed many things.
#
There are no Rao Bahadur or sirs or things that the Raj used to give out.
#
I'm not saying we kept everything of the Raj, but we managed to do this in an evolutionary
#
step by step constitutional manner.
#
It could have approved.
#
It could also, of course, we argued that we kept things like the Indian Penal Code with
#
the sedition law and the anti-free speech laws like 254 and 153.
#
Yeah, the law on homosexuality.
#
The Indian Penal Code is a very...
#
One of the things I've mentioned somewhere is that...
#
Now we don't know for a fact whether Manus Prithi was actually used or it was simply
#
a ideal text that was referred to.
#
But under Manus Prithi, the same crime committed by persons of different caste origins would
#
have different punishments.
#
Indian Penal Code doesn't have that.
#
It's quite clear that a murder is a murder.
#
It is a crime that is punished and it is not the caste of the individual is irrelevant.
#
So it has those good features.
#
It has features associated with 19th century social thinking on homosexuality or on sedition
#
And I think the way to do it again is the way we've done it.
#
Do it by passing a law, having a select committee, sit, talk about it, discuss, debate, change
#
the law or go through an elaborate judicial process and let the court rule.
#
You know, that's the way to do it, not by having a revolutionary change one fine day
#
saying we will get rid of this.
#
Because then the whole Penal Code, if you throw out, you throw out also some of the
#
good things that are there.
#
I'll come back to that a little later.
#
I want to move to another question now.
#
Since we are discussing what conservatism is and what Burke's fundamental insight was,
#
I want to quote from someone who is my intellectual hero, Frederick Hayek.
#
And he's written this famous essay you must have read called Why I Am Not A Conservative.
#
So I'll just quote a bit from that.
#
He of course at the time called himself a liberal, but that was in the classical sense,
#
A classical liberal, today he'd be called a libertarian and basically both labels which
#
I think more or less would apply to me though I avoid labels.
#
But here's what Hayek has to say in his essay, Why I Am Not A Conservative, quote, let me
#
now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called
#
It is that by its very nature, it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we
#
It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments.
#
But since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance.
#
It has for this reason invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a
#
path not of its own choosing, stop quote.
#
And my question here is, I mean, I know what you've clarified multiple times in your book
#
is that conservatives don't merely want to stop change.
#
They want to change gradually and they want to keep what's best of the past.
#
I'm anticipating that you're going to say that.
#
But my deeper sort of question and my genuine puzzlement is that if the central insight
#
of conservatism is about the means of affecting change, what about the ends?
#
If I ask a conservative, what are your ends?
#
You know, and you will get different answers from different people.
#
You would, of course, also talk about individual rights and so on.
#
But then the question is that if conservatism is centered around not changing things abruptly,
#
then where do you actually draw your ends from?
#
Let's start with Hayek now.
#
It's a very continental view of the world where there's a linear theory of historical
#
And so progress is happening and conservatives are being dragged because progress is going
#
Now we are very, very skeptical about this because this is the thing that keeps promising
#
utopia, promising some great progress and therefore don't hold it back, which ties
#
up with your question about ends.
#
Actually conservatives do not have a very strong view on ends because we reject the
#
idea of a utopian end and we reject the idea of perfection.
#
So things will not be perfect.
#
Yes, incrementally there will be less hunger than today.
#
Tomorrow we hope there will be more freedom for men and women than today.
#
But will there be perfect freedom?
#
So, in fact, the means are the end.
#
There is no such thing as working towards a superordinate goal that comes at the end
#
That's rejected completely because utopias are the scariest thing for conservatives because
#
for two reasons, in a consequential sense, most attempts to get to utopia lead to dystopias.
#
And that's a fact in history we've seen, in a more fundamental model sense, religious
#
conservatives would take the position that it is not up to human beings to make heaven
#
That is God's role and non-religious conservatives would take the position that such a paradise
#
on earth is neither possible nor feasible and its pursuit will only result in hubris.
#
So that would be my response to the Hayek observation and your question about ends.
#
No, I entirely agree with you that chasing utopias normally leads to dystopia.
#
But let me sort of try to elaborate on where I'm coming from.
#
For me, where I derive my view of the world is not from a view of history proceeding in
#
a certain direction or that the world should be like this, a particular end state.
#
I rather derive it from a set of values which holds individual rights to be paramount above
#
And therefore, I want the world to move towards a position where the consent of every individual
#
is respected more and there is less and less coercion.
#
That's sort of the directional movement that I would...
#
For us, the fact is rights and obligations are intertwined.
#
The idea that rights for people exist in isolation of their obligations to other human beings,
#
to environment, et cetera, is not something that conservatives would easily accept.
#
The second issue really is that things like particularly in the area of rights, in recent
#
times, the liberal position, unfortunately, has moved away beyond individual rights to
#
communal rights, to community rights, to group rights.
#
I think that if I may interrupt that again, I think depends on...
#
Because the meaning of the word liberal has been changed and appropriated, and so you're
#
only talking about left liberals.
#
Non-classical liberals.
#
And that, of course, conservatives are very petrified about.
#
No, I oppose that as much as you.
#
No, I'm telling you why we are petrified about, because we actually want associative things.
#
We are for associative things.
#
But again, from a perspective of common traditions, from a perspective of band of brothers coming
#
together, from a perspective of social transactions, trust, the danger with these group rights,
#
if you will, is that they become pathological at some stage.
#
And that's what conservatives are so scared of.
#
But coming back to your earlier issue, the idea of a right, which is not intertwined
#
with an obligation or a duty, it just won't fly with virtually any...
#
So let me respond to both of those.
#
I mean, first, as far as your aversion to group rights is concerned, mine is no less.
#
Because group rights and individual rights can't coexist, and group rights always go
#
hand in hand with coercion.
#
But equally, I'm, again, for associative behavior, as long as it is voluntary.
#
It has to be voluntary.
#
It has to be a consent coercion thing.
#
Particularly, no sovereign state intervention.
#
As for rights versus obligations, I think in the Lockean view of rights, which I subscribe
#
to, I think rights do come with obligations, but the only obligation I will accept is the
#
obligation to respect the corresponding rights of others.
#
Because only in that situation do your own rights have any meaning.
#
But that clarification aside, I don't actually want to harangue you and sort of...
#
Because honestly, your book was just a wonderful read.
#
I learned a lot from it also about the development of conservatism in India, things which I didn't
#
You showed me a new lens to look at it.
#
So I will save my thorny questions for the end, the rest of them.
#
And let's kind of go back to your book.
#
An interesting statement you make early in the book is you point out that, quote, conservatism
#
in India is not purely or entirely an imported intellectual conceit.
#
You say, quote, its antecedents are both universal and Indian, two of a civilization's foundational
#
text, the Shanti Parva of the Mahabharata and the Tirukkural of Tiruvalluvar, can be
#
seen as providing the enduring basis of Indian conservatism.
#
And a little later you talk about the Telugu poet, Allasi Peddana, and you point out how
#
he, quote, dealt with concerns that are uncannily similar to those of Scruton today, this rock
#
So elaborate a little bit on that.
#
The first of all, the orientalist view that Indian intellectual traditions are ascetic
#
and otherworldly, et cetera, is comprehensively dismissed if you look at the Shanti Parva
#
and the Tirukkural, which I believe both constitute, I use the word foundational texts very advisedly.
#
I believe that they are very, very central to our whole wealth and shang.
#
They both incidentally are interested in the trivargas, the three purusharthas.
#
In Sanskrit you would call them artha, dharma, and kama.
#
Artha is a pursuit of political and economic activity, dharma is pursuit of virtue and
#
ethics, kama is a pursuit of pleasure and sensory stuff and aesthetic sensibility.
#
It's called Porul Aram and Inmam in Tirukkural.
#
The interesting thing that both texts kind of glide over, they acknowledge that the fourth
#
salvation is the fourth goal, moksha, for human beings is the most important and transcends
#
But the implicit assumption is you get these three right, salvation is automatically taken
#
So, so much for accusing Indians of being otherworldly, neither is valluvar otherworldly
#
nor is Vyasa in the Shanti Parva otherworldly.
#
The second thing that they are both focused on is how should an individual pursue artha,
#
dharma, and kama, Porul Aram and Inmam?
#
And how should he or she pursue this in society?
#
So that's for conservatives, the second part is very important.
#
We do not see ourselves as isolated, autonomous people, but as people in a band of brothers
#
And the focus is in both rights and obligations therefore.
#
The focus is on the sober pursuit of wealth.
#
Sober is as important as pursuit, virtuous pursuit of wealth and political power, and
#
a balanced pursuit of the aesthetic sensibility, imbued with ethics.
#
And then there's extensive discussion on the importance of the ploughman in Valluvar.
#
The central figure for Valluvar, by the way, is not the merchant, the soldier or the king,
#
but it's the ploughman.
#
Because you know, and I mentioned it somewhere, it's almost like, you know, Piers Ploughman
#
Langman's poem, it's almost as if Valluvar anticipates it by a thousand years.
#
The pursuit of activity in a meaningful way and in a social context.
#
Now in the Shanti Parva, there's a lot of discussion of Rajadharma.
#
What is the appropriate virtuous conduct for a king?
#
So everybody says before Magna Carta was written in England, the king was above the law.
#
That was the first time that the king was brought under the law.
#
Shanti Parva is quite clear.
#
The king is subject to a royal law that he has to follow.
#
And there is this concern about Nyaya, about the fact that you need justice and you need
#
a social milieu in which justice and good conduct prevails.
#
For the ancient Indian scholars, the most horrifying thought was Matsya Nyaya.
#
Matsya Nyaya is where the big fish eat the small fish.
#
It's a breakdown of law and order.
#
It's a breakdown of order in society.
#
For them, that has to be the most horrifying times in life.
#
It's like Hobbes almost.
#
Before order comes, how it is, how brutish and nasty it is.
#
So this anticipation of so many of these conservative ideas going back, and there is one which in
#
fact predates even the Mahabharata and the Kural, which goes back all the way to the
#
Apasama Sutra, Dhajur Veda, which is Yogadharma, which comes to your point or Ayak's point
#
But Yogadharma is an idea that different ages have different dharmas.
#
Now if you were living 2,000 years, 3,000 years ago in ancient Athens and slavery was
#
prevalent, what would be your advice to a slave?
#
Be an obedient slave now.
#
That doesn't make it right or wrong or fashionable, but that was appropriate for that time and
#
your advice to the master would be treat your slave kindly.
#
But 2,000 years later you say, no, let's abolish slavery.
#
This is a different age.
#
In a particular age, in an age before the birth control pill was invented, there was
#
a certain level of freedom that women couldn't aspire to.
#
Now if that has changed, if technology provides for certain things, you have to automatically
#
make the change that that provides.
#
So Yogadharma is another one which is very, very central to particularly to the idea in
#
Conningsby, which is one of the Israeli's famous novels, he mentions that we have to
#
gradually change without abandoning the best in the past and that's what Yogadharma is
#
There are certain aspects of Dharma that do not change, you know, right conduct, speaking
#
Those are eternal verities, but certain aspects do change and you must be willing to make.
#
And I think Raja Ram Mohan right frankly understood that.
#
That is why he is such an important figure in modern Indian conservatism.
#
He understood that we had to discard some old practices and he did it very cleverly.
#
He simply said, they're not in keeping with the spirit of our own scriptures.
#
It's kind of a very clever, dexterous way of doing it.
#
But this Yogadharma is also very much there in our texts.
#
Lastly, which is something that we may come back to in later discussions, I do pay some
#
attention to the Atharva Veda where we are, when we talk about conserving the environment,
#
which is a very central idea in Indian thought and what it means.
#
In fact, Burke has made a brilliant speech on that subject in the House of Commons, not
#
when he was talking about Warren Hastings impeachment, when he was talking about the
#
Prince of Arcot's debts, Prince of Arcot's debts and a very funny and very sad set of
#
events in Indian history, we can talk about that offline.
#
But anyway, while talking about that, Burke refers to the fact that Indian kings built
#
canals, reservoirs, created lakes, knowing full well that they would not enjoy them,
#
but they were for the enjoyment of future generations.
#
So there was an intergenerational kind of trust and transaction there and Burke talks
#
But he knew enough about India to be able to say, to refer to that kind of detail.
#
So let's sort of come to relatively modern times, by which I mean the last 200 years
#
And one of the interesting things I sort of discovered in your book was you present this
#
lens of looking at Indian conservatism, where you say that it's not one thing.
#
There are two very distinct strands which are running through Indian conservatism.
#
And one of them, of course, is the Raja Ram Mohan Roy strand, which is sort of more inspired
#
Tell me a little bit about both these strands.
#
I mean, let's start with Raja Ram Mohan Roy.
#
Raja Ram Mohan Roy, one of his most important statements he made to a visiting Frenchman
#
was that he wanted British rule to continue for a long time.
#
So here is a man saying something very important, saying, let's not get rid of the British
#
Let us learn from them.
#
Let us imbibe what is good and not be in a hurry for some kind of quick revolutionary
#
He would have opposed the 1857 uprising, for instance.
#
And he lied before that, so we can't say for sure, but I would suspect that he would have.
#
And he was also for making sure we maintain continuity with our own traditions.
#
So Upanishads and Brahmasamajhi reintroduces or introduces Upanishadic prayers.
#
So he did not see a contradiction in getting the best out of the Raj traditions and getting
#
the best out of ancient Indian traditions and building on them for constructive, slow
#
constitutional evolutionary change.
#
How did he ask for change?
#
He wrote a letter to the governor general.
#
He didn't go and, you know, beat up and have a revolutionary attack.
#
No, he petitioned in triplicate.
#
That's, I know it sounds boring.
#
It doesn't sound romantic.
#
Revolutionaries are always romantic, but this is boring.
#
This is discussions, debates, committees, petitions, signatures, but that's what results
#
in enduring change and in constructive change, which does not kind of destroy other stuff
#
while making the change that one wants to.
#
He got rid of many other things.
#
He was very much in favor of English language, although he was a scholar of Persian Sanskrit,
#
He realized that in the Raj we had this opportunity and so he wanted English education.
#
So the joy represents this bundle of patriotism, pride in the country, pragmatism, empiricism,
#
all of the things that we like in and above all continuity, slow evolutionary, proper
#
And I think there is a direct kind of, you know, line down from him to various conservatives
#
right through and Bhandarkar clearly is in that Prajadonath Sarkar, is in that league
#
and comes down all the way to Raju Gopalacharya and Masani in the second half of the 20th
#
So there is in the political side and frankly on the aesthetic side there is also with it
#
coming down through Kumaraswami and so on this idea that we need to keep this balance
#
between the open issues and modern learning.
#
It's not one or the other, you know, many, many people felt it was one or the other.
#
In fact, I've argued that instead of decrying English and accusing English speaking Indians
#
of being McCauley putras and so on, we should look at McCauley who was actually fairly vain
#
and conceited and foolish fellow in many other respects.
#
But he did us a favor, it's the way we should look at it, like Rishya Sringa, I don't know
#
if you remember in Valmiki Ramayana, he's the man who does the Yajna and Rama is born.
#
So he gave us the great prince of our land Rama.
#
So similarly McCauley for whatever stupid reasons of his own has given us this great
#
gift of English, which instead of kind of getting head up and worked up about and having
#
an inferiority complex about, we need to understand its value and we need to see it as part of
#
There is no discontinuity there.
#
I would say English has been an Indian language for more than a century now.
#
I did an episode with the historian Manu Pillay and he pointed out how when the Indian National
#
Congress met for the first time in 1886 or whatever year it was, 1885, that the people
#
came from all over, they were dressed in all kinds of clothes, but the one common thing,
#
the one condition practically for being part of the gathering is that you knew English
#
otherwise, how would you converse?
#
So it was almost as if the British gave us that common thread.
#
I want to come back to exploring in much more detail the Raja Ram Mohan Roy's strand as
#
it were, but for the benefit of our listeners, before we come back to that, can you also
#
talk a little bit about the second strand and what it is, which is about...
#
There is a second strand in Indian conservatism and most leftists do not like to admit it
#
or do not...I think just by...they feel that just by dismissing it, it will go away or
#
it will get less...it will become intellectually lightweight and I reject that.
#
I think it is a very respectable school.
#
You may have agreements, disagreements with it, but it's worthy of respect, it's worthy
#
of interest, it's worthy of study, which is the Hindu nationalist school of Indian conservatism
#
which starts with...in some sense, there may be earlier antecedents, but at modern times
#
it starts with Bankeem Chandra Chatterjee and it has its own lineage going down through
#
Lajpat Rai, Malavya, even again Bandarkar is here also, you can see him on both sides
#
here and then it comes down all the way to Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, Shyamprasad Mukherjee.
#
So that has got its own intellectual gravitas and the argument will always be made whether
#
this is in fact conservative or is it a radical revivalist school.
#
And I think I have taken the position and I continue to take the position that it is
#
either a subset of Indian conservatism or it's a sibling of work in Indian conservatism.
#
It is not something far removed, it's very much there and just kind of ad hominem attacks
#
or just kind of glib dismissals is not going to make its intellectual respectability go
#
I think I have to confess that I used to glibly dismiss it myself as well and it's actually
#
in the course of doing this podcast and many episodes such as a recent episode with Akshay
#
Mukul where we spoke about the Geeta Press when we realized that it's actually a very
#
coherent intellectual tradition with its own values and first principles which I may not
#
agree with but that doesn't mean that one should not engage with it and that it is nothing
#
but bigotry and misogyny dressed up in more respectable colors which is what I once used
#
to think and I have a more nuanced view of that now.
#
And of course the one point that you make in your book is that the Raja Ram Mohan Roy
#
strand of Indian conservatism sort of became, sort of lost its impetus around the death
#
of the Swatantra Party and the conservatism that you now see with Hindu nationalism is
#
really a form of the Bankim Chandra Chottopadhyay school.
#
At least in the political sphere you're right, yes that is correct.
#
I think Burkian conservatism today would not be able to operate as an independent political
#
Its best hope is to try and influence other movements.
#
So I'd like to go back to your book now.
#
In your chapter on conservatism in the political sphere in India you have a sort of a fascinating
#
chronology of this tradition, the Burkian tradition, the Raja Ram Mohan Roy tradition
#
and one of the interesting points that you make there is their willingness to work with
#
and often their support for the British and often for good reasons that liberals today
#
For example, you know, again to quote from your book at one point you say, quote the
#
historian Raj Mohan Gandhi has pointed out that the Dalit leader Anshas had gone one
#
step further when in as early as 1970 he had argued that the departure of the British in
#
the launch of home rule, whether by Brahmins or non-Brahmins, would crush the Dalits.
#
Stop quote and later on you write, quote the Raj did have a liberating touch for India's
#
downtrodden for reasons of their own persons as distinct as Bhera Malabari, Pandita Ramabai,
#
Cornelia Swarabji and others were also supporters of prolonged British rule.
#
They believed that it prevented the emergence of a ruling elite dominated by the upper caste.
#
And later on in the book you say, quote the same issue received considerable attention
#
from our detractors like Kipling who argued that Indians did not deserve freedom principally
#
because we were given to oppressing our women and our poor and in fact it was a British
#
who protected these unhappy residents of our fair land.
#
Stop quote and you know it also strikes me that I've been reading a biography of Churchill
#
recently because I've been sort of researching the Bengal famine and the interesting thing
#
is that a lot of Churchill's criticisms of Gandhi and the Congress, you know they make
#
for pithy quotes but when you look at his elaborations for them they have to do with
#
oh these upper caste we know how they treat the Dalits or the lower caste as he would
#
call them and you know if we leave India God knows what will happen to them.
#
And this is very interesting because like on the whole I think that empire hurt us much
#
more than it helped us and one can argue that.
#
But it is not a complete black and white situation and the leaders of that generation possibly
#
could not know what we now know with the benefit of hindsight that this can be a viable independent
#
They just knew sort of what the reality is which is that the British are ruling.
#
How best do we work to make things within that tradition.
#
That's a classic conservative thinking.
#
I think within the British establishment while there were some who believed that there could
#
never be a viable free India even early on Malcolm and Montserrat Elphinstone and Monroe
#
had kind of figured out that eventually British rule would end and Indians would take on the
#
question really is that my point is in the NCERT textbooks post-independence anyone who
#
supported British rule is portrayed as a traitor, as a bad person and I'm saying there's such
#
a bloody range of people Malabariya, Jyotima Phule, I mean Ancha Sait, Ambedkar, Tej Bahadur
#
Sapur they were not all they were quite patriotic, they were quite patriotic and the point is
#
that they were not and of course these leftists will say compradors all rubbish words they
#
They don't change the fact that the I mentioned earlier technically I don't know how many
#
kings in India actually use the Manusmriti but technically a Dalit's rights in a criminal
#
court were far fewer than upper caste person's rights in under the Manusmriti and this was
#
not the case with the Indian Penal Court which Macaulay wrote so there is a goodness that
#
the British rule had towards certain subaltern groups and this granular study needs to be
#
made you need to listen to them it's not just NCERT telling us British rule was bad what
#
did Ancha say, what did you know what did Ambedkar say, Ambedkar was a member of the
#
Viceroy's Executive Council right through the war does that make him any less patriotic?
#
I mean of course not, Hindu Mahasabha President made speeches encouraging Indians to join
#
the war effort because he said for so long we've been disarmed and we haven't been given
#
military training let us join the Navy, Air Force and Army was that unpatriotic I don't
#
I think Mahatma Gandhi did during the First World War.
#
During the First World War right he did so does that make them unpatriotic you know in
#
fact these things easy ways of describing dismissing people take away from the complex
#
relationship between the British and the Indians most Indian soldiers who joined the British
#
Indian Army saw soldiering as a noble profession as something that they were proud to do and
#
they went and did it now you can't dismiss them as mercenary unpatriotic people in fact
#
the present government at least has made you know I've written in the book with Belgium
#
with Britain with France with Israel we have now honored Indian soldiers otherwise the
#
previous dispensations from 47 onwards you're wanted to keep quiet about the Indian contribution
#
to First World War and Second World War.
#
And all of those soldiers were fighting for the government of India as it was then it's
#
just a different matter that it was a part of the empire but they might have been fighting
#
for their regiment which is very important for them I mean this this exposed fact to
#
judgment by these self appointed judges I find that very very difficult to accept the
#
Madras regiment which is the oldest regiment of the Indian Army started by Stringer Lawrence
#
around the siege of our court in 1750 now what are we talking about it had Hindus Muslims
#
Christians it had Dalits upper castes it had it was one of the first integrated institutions
#
in India now that's that is a British gift to us now you can say they did many other
#
bad things I had famines they had racist courts they didn't let us sit in first class I'm
#
not saying everything that they did was right but you must say and let's build let's now
#
create a take that Madras regiment tradition forward which is what we are doing today right
#
let's take a quick commercial break now and when we come back let's get a little deeper
#
into the Raja Ram Mohun Roy strand of Indian conservatism.
#
Hi everybody welcome to another great week on the IVM podcast network if you're not following
#
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So this week on Cyrus says Cyrus is joined by Ramya Ramamurthy and Varun Deshpande of
#
the Good Food Institute they explain what plant-based meat is what will be the next
#
food revolution and the objective behind their podcast feeding 10 billion.
#
That's not all you're going to see of Ramya this week Ramya is also on the paperback podcast
#
with Harsita and Satyaji she discusses her book Rebuild and points out how brands have
#
tackled situation of crisis guys we have some really exciting news this week too our show
#
advertising is dead has reached 50 episodes the special occasion was marked with a live
#
recording at the glitch office we had some really really great guests for this episode
#
as well Rohan Joshi the comedian was there as was actor social media influencer and co-host
#
of Agla station adulthood Ritasha Rathore the episode drops on Tuesday November 5th
#
make sure you check it out on our Karnataka podcast Thale Harate Pawan and Surya sit down
#
to talk about how Karnataka must think about its future so that the state can deliver prosperity
#
and well-being to all its residents on Simplified the gang is back for part four of the hundred
#
and fiftieth episode that's a long hundred and fiftieth episode they got going there
#
join Chuck and Naren as they break down the dying question of why is cyan called Shiv
#
the Easter Islands Instagram influencer ecosystems and a whole lot more and with that let's get
#
you on with your show welcome back to the scene in the unseen I'm chatting with Jerry
#
Rao about his book the Indian conservative and Indian conservatism in general one of
#
the fascinating elements of this book was two parallel strands of Indian conservatism
#
which you know I am roughly taking the liberty of calling them the Raja Ram Mohan Roy strand
#
and the bunk in general chart to Padhya is that's a perfectly correct way of three R
#
and BCC that's to even shorten it further so I want to now sort of you know you referred
#
to RG Bandarkar a couple of times and you referred to his 1895 speech so I'll just
#
quote from that aware please what a brilliant sentence and that seems to encapsulate the
#
sort of book in conservatism that you know a lot of the Indian liberals slash conservatives
#
of the time and I'll come to that nomenclature as well used to believe in and Mr. Bandarkar
#
says this is 1895 mind you quote we should not adopt the procedure of the French Revolution
#
but imitate the mode of action of the English people whose pupils we are they have realized
#
as great changes as the French Revolution sought to effect but in a manner which connects
#
him with the past history of the country stop quote and you speak about this sentence your
#
words now quote this single statement can be considered the high watermark of 19th and
#
early 20th century conservatism and you know some of my intellectual heroes are people
#
have thought of as liberal heroes in the classical liberal sense people like analogy ran a day
#
Gopal Krishna Gokhale especially Agarkar and it seems to me that in your book you have
#
appropriated them and where I guess it fits in is that it seems to me that in their belief
#
for gradualism working within the system giving petitions in triplicate what they are doing
#
is moving towards what I would call liberal ends through conservative means.
#
Well I would say they are advocating gradual constructive evolutionary change that's the
#
way I would put it because as I said as we talked earlier this ends always worries us
#
and I think the reason I've also mentioned why many of these people did not get tracked
#
as conservatives I laid the blame entirely with a section of stupid Tories in England
#
who represent the George III Lord North School of Tories and going back to the 1760s 1770s
#
and which also had an element of racism about it.
#
So Nauroji could only get an election ticket from the Liberal Party you know when Gokhale
#
went to England only liberals would need to listen to him so the Tories cut themselves
#
off from the spirit of gradual change when it came to India not all Tories but most Tories
#
did and that is what Burke would have emphasized did in fact it emphasized in his speeches
#
and that's what they lost out on as a result really nearly all these guys got associated
#
with the British Liberal Party and therefore they got tagged along as liberals and yes
#
the question of what is liberal and what is conservatist I mean considering we are now
#
talking about intellectual traditions which are 300 years old it's not some Hori antiquity
#
going back to Plato or Isaiah this is recent times and during the times of Burke and in
#
the times of Locke and Adam Smith and so on these were still evolving terms okay and so
#
too in India I think they were evolving terms.
#
Now what Bandarkar is saying is very key he's saying several things in that statement he's
#
saying one the British achieved the same change that the French achieved right equality before
#
law extended franchise all those things that were that the French Revolution gave as gifts
#
to its citizens but they achieved it without the violence and more importantly they achieved
#
it without a break in their history in their consciousness so there they remain the continuing
#
thread of Englishness which was violently disrupted in France and frankly till the 20th
#
century till the Dreyfus case and so on France never really recovered from these traditions
#
of anti-clericalism at one extreme Roman Catholic conservatism monarchism all kinds of things
#
they just never managed to create a blended bland of brothers the way the English were
#
able to do that's what he's trying to say that hey let's imitate the British let's
#
take our traditions along.
#
The other important point is making which is subtly inserted that we are their pupils
#
after all so there is making the point that we have a large connection we are being ruled
#
by them that connection is there it's an organic connection it's a link it's the contingencies
#
of history have done it if I had lost at one divorce the French might have ruled us I mean
#
these are contingencies in history and we never know how the counterfactuals would have
#
been but given that it has happened what Bandarkar is saying we are their pupils and we should
#
learn from them we should take advantage of British rule we should obviously work against
#
those things about British rule which are bad or inimical to our interests nobody is
#
denying that Naroji never denied that he was very clear about that but do it while not
#
jettisoning the good things about British rule and the interesting thing is that even
#
Gandhi himself was of the school of thought he was a great admirer of Gokhale in South
#
Africa he would basically be petitioning by triplicate till he did his first satyagraha
#
he never started a satyagraha without first giving a petition by the way not one first
#
he would write a petition request to Erwin to anybody didn't matter who only then would
#
he start his first order satyagraha and it just strikes me that you know just thinking
#
of Gandhi's dandy march Naroji in 1894 or 1895 if I remember correctly had brought up
#
the salt tax in the British parliament demanding that it be repealed and Gandhi took up the
#
same cause later and the irony is both of them failed because the salt tax today is
#
far higher no matter how you look at it than it was back in the day.
#
Is salt subject to GST I don't think so is it?
#
I don't know but the last I checked like three years ago I wrote a piece about it and
#
the last I checked the salt tax in independent India was much more than under the British
#
which in a sense buttresses my point that the kind of the kind of oppression you should
#
get this in the front pages man because this is something we we must be the problem with
#
salt in the British was more than the tax it was also an egregiously absurd monopoly
#
exactly and in fact there are studies would show that it might have actually resulted
#
in lower consumption of salt among the poor stunting of bodies and all kinds of you know
#
really reprehensible consequences there was a department called Akbari department Akbari
#
department was and people got jobs in Akbari department they they sold salt and controlled
#
salt there's a Premchand short story called namakka daroga so there is a daroga there
#
is a policeman or a police inspector whose job is to control salt namakka daroga so it
#
was a very central part of the Raj experience and a very unfortunate one.
#
Which is a nice segue to sort of the next point I want to look at which is conservative
#
support for markets because the interesting thing is the British also for example destroyed
#
the cotton industry in India and it you know all sort of shifted to Manchester and they
#
destroyed many local industries and but what a mistake that people often make today is
#
conflating empire and markets just because empire came to us via a corporation which
#
is a East India company but as many of what I would call the great freedom fighting liberals
#
but you would say conservatives and I think there's you know sense in ascribing both those
#
labels to them what a lot of them constantly protested about was what the British really
#
did was they came here and they destroyed free markets in India rather than the other
#
way around and I'm again going to quote from your book quote both Naroji and Dutt that's
#
Dadabhai Naroji and RC Dutt both Naroji and Dutt held firm that the Indian entrepreneur
#
the Indian merchant the Indian producer did not need or want any special support.
#
What they advocated was a free and level playing field where British economic interests and
#
the interests of favored British crony capitalists would not be the deciding factor in the framing
#
of government policies and actions stop quote and they were of course protesting behavior
#
which impoverished millions in our country which destroyed our local economy and which
#
even other great conservatives like Burke and Adam Smith protested against.
#
Adam Smith hated the East India Company for two reasons one he felt that is ridiculous
#
to allow a commercial company to rule a country it will always rule in the interest of its
#
shareholders not of the country which is the primary purpose of government to rule for
#
the benefit of the citizens and two because it was a monopoly on both counts he hated
#
it Burke of course disliked it immensely for very similar reasons.
#
I think the Valsha Neeraj Chanda actually made this point in practical terms when he
#
fought with the British shipping companies P&O whatever the shipping company was Inchcape
#
Lord Inchcape was the guy running it you know they basically had monopolies exactly and
#
he said wait a minute I don't want to run a ship what's the big deal you know in fact
#
there is a very famous Tamilian V.O. Chidambaram Pillai he started a South India shipping steam
#
shipping company and he was basically put in jail he was not allowed to I mean we were
#
not free entry which is one of the requirements of a market economy was was he essentially
#
In fact I did an episode on the historian Manu Pillai about this and he mentioned Milt
#
Pillai and who started this thing in about I think 1906 1907 lost everything was impoverished
#
and then when Gandhi returned to India from South Africa he was this one time tycoon was
#
in the egregious position of trying to borrow a little bit of a petty amount from Mohandas
#
Gandhi and just makes you feel so sad that he's sort of forgotten heroes and the way
#
they were destroyed by an oppressive empire not entirely the similar from the oppressive
#
Yeah this is a point you know when state sovereign governments decide to use their power to stifle
#
markets to stifle free human economic activity they invariably do it to help one bunch of
#
people who support them and the rest is history rest is sadness.
#
You know and it's sad that the intellectual argument for markets becomes hard to make
#
an almost counterintuitive because what people from the outside is they see companies benefit
#
and they conflate that with markets.
#
So earlier you would look at East India company benefiting and you would conflate that with
#
oh look what free markets have done to India when in reality there was only cronyism no
#
free markets and you have a similar thing today when you have that oh look at the favors
#
the government is dispensing to its favored capitalists be they Ambani Adani whoever and
#
again this is cronyism it's not free markets we don't have free markets here either.
#
Free entry is one of the most important things anybody should be able to enter a business
#
you know there's licensing that's prohibiting people from entering business giving entire
#
Russian trade goes to one British company entire Indian trade one company absurd completely
#
Now to something again which you said in your book you just wrote up George the third and
#
you pointed out in your book and this is very interesting that in some ways there is a similarity
#
between George the third and Churchill in the sense that in the 1930s one of the aims
#
of all these Indian conservatives was actually about to happen.
#
India was about to be granted dominion status as Stanley Baldwin wanted and Baldwin was
#
firm about it but Churchill staked his career on it in fact that decade of his is called
#
the wilderness years because he chose to go against his party on two questions one of
#
course is granting India dominion status and the other of course was which evolved in the
#
second half of the decade was the appeasement of Hitler but the interesting point you were
#
making there was that the conservatives almost got what they wanted if not for Churchill
#
and then we might still have been a dominion with a titular head being the British Queen
#
and as per you and as per conservatives that's not a very bad state of affairs.
#
So my question to you therefore is a slightly mischievous question is that is independence
#
then a mistake that we should regret and it was accompanied by say the horrors of partition
#
which you would expect with any radical act.
#
These are things that after the fact one can never really make judgments about counterfactuals
#
but let me first deal with the George the third thing that's not my original idea Leopold
#
Amory who was a minister in Churchill's cabinet he is said your Secretary of State for India.
#
He said Winston knows as much about India as George the third knew about the colony.
#
So that's where the idea his own friend colleagues schoolmate he said that there's a history
#
between Amory and Churchill have you read Churchill's autobiography my early days no
#
So in that there's this funny incident where he goes to school and he sees a small kid
#
near the swimming pool and he goes and he pushes this kid in the swimming pool and then
#
that kid emerges enraged and he cheeses Churchill around to beat him up and it turns out that
#
kid is actually two years senior to him and is Leopold Amory and then Churchill calms
#
him down by saying that I'm sorry I didn't know you were senior because you're so small
#
and then he realizes that could be a faux pas and he says it's OK my father was also
#
small he was a great man.
#
Anyway that's a complete good friends but but Amory was sensible he said hey this guy
#
OK now let's look at the counterfactuals that you've talked about.
#
So I mean I wrote a brilliant piece some years ago about India becoming free in 47 and Hong
#
Kong in 97 I mean our British rule ending in Hong Kong and he said maybe Hong Kong lucked
#
out by having 50 years of free markets and the stable British laws and then free trade.
#
So it's not obvious that independence is necessarily such a great thing.
#
And in fact Bernard Lewis has made this point when he talks about the Arab Middle East he
#
says independence is not the same as freedom.
#
You can be French colony Syria then you become independent Syrian people are no freer they
#
So those are things that now there's also been a view has been a view when in the 30s
#
as this and especially after 1940 the Lahore resolution of the Muslim League when this
#
discussion kept going there were two three possibilities.
#
One was to take someone like the Prince of Wales and make him the titular head of a united
#
So then this Hindu Muslim the Muslim separatism for Pakistan automatically comes down.
#
There was another move to go and find the last surviving descendant of Bahadur Shah Zafar
#
and make him a titular emperor.
#
So there were these kinds of ideas that were floated.
#
It was not inconceivable that you could think of a dispensation which has a monarchical
#
because generally imperial dispensations tend to be monarchical.
#
In fact at one point Mahatma Gandhi made a throwaway comment that the Nizam of Hyderabad
#
could be the next emperor of India to which Savarkar responded by saying that no it should
#
be a Hindu kingdom with the king of Nepal on top which is very amusing in hindsight.
#
You know I think what if the Nizam had been made emperor but it had been a constitutional
#
monarchy hey it might have worked because it might have kept Pakistan but you know these
#
are all counterfactuals.
#
If you look in my book I am now convinced that these are silly arguments that we should
#
stop pursuing Pakistan is a reality it has happened this idea of let's unite again altogether
#
all that is bogus we should just move on.
#
But my question was not so much about the counterfactual but about if you put yourself
#
back in that time independence is clearly a radical idea remaining part of the empire
#
would be the conservative way to go.
#
Everybody wanted that, Sapoor wanted that, Shastri wanted that and finally if you look
#
at it for three years we remained in Dominion.
#
In fact that was V.P. Menon and Brown-Batons and Patel and Nehru's final decision to and
#
at least supported it so suppose we continued kept the constitution but remained in Dominion
#
it's entirely possible we might be more like Canada or Australia today I don't know it's
#
very difficult to I think the it might have been politically difficult I think the movement
#
under Mahatma which was not a conservative movement which was a radical movement had
#
radicalized Indian masses a little too much and I don't think people would have gone
#
along with they might have in 1935 but not in 1947.
#
Speaking of sort of political difficulties let's continue talking about the Raja Ram Mohan
#
Roy School where you know we've gone through this early set of reformist conservatives
#
in your Naroji, Gokhale, Mehta I presume you would ignore and even Motilal Nehru to
#
an extent would probably fall within that.
#
He was not a man of many ideas there's no intellectual there's not much intellectual
#
stuff you can find as coming output out.
#
I think a lot of from what little I know Motilal Nehru it seems to me that he was actually
#
a classical liberal who did believe in gradualism and working sort of yeah that's for sure.
#
Let's move on to the what you call the conservative caucus within the Congress where you point
#
out that at the time India gained independence we had the three golden years where I'll
#
again quote from your book quote for the first three years of independence till the new constitution
#
came into force the Ram Mohan Roy tradition of conservatism held sway in the country the
#
erudite conservative Rajendra Prasad presided over the constituent assembly the incandescent
#
conservative Raj Gopalachari succeeded Mountbatten as a governor general Ambedkar a former member
#
of the Viceroy's council became the chairman of the drafting committee for the constitution
#
Sardar Patel did defang the princely order not a very conservative thing to do but he
#
understood the value of continuity if only symbolic stop quote and I'll come back to
#
you know you're claiming Ambedkar as a conservative also after those no Ambedkar and Gandhi are
#
it's very difficult for anybody to claim them they do contain multitudes but the interesting
#
thing is that many leftists call Gandhi a conservative so I find that tongue-in-cheek
#
kind of funny and interesting and Ambedkar many people criticize him for having been
#
in the Viceroy's executive council as if there was a bad thing he and the guy what's
#
his name Bengali fellow here who was also in the Viceroy's executive council worked
#
on Damodar Valley cooperation they worked on constructive things they were not stupid
#
you know not unpatriotic at all this is this binary anybody who was pro-British Raj in
#
any even in the slight way is is not a patriot anybody who's gone to jail against the British
#
Raj is a patriot is not is not acceptable and I guess patriotism exists when the nation
#
exists but the point that you also made about Ambedkar was that it was in your view a masterful
#
move to make him in charge of drafting the Constitution because he brought conservatizing
#
influence if I can use that neologism upon the framing of the Constitution explain that
#
to me a little bit see the Government of India Act of 1935 has to be one of the finest pieces
#
of legislation ever written up it was drafted after extensive parliamentary discussions
#
committee discussions in Westminster actually was very actively involved in it and it basically
#
provided for pretty much the federal structure that we have today in India it also provided
#
for a relatively strong center which is again what we have in India today and offshoots
#
after the Government of India came the Reserve Bank of India Act this that and the other
#
they were all came together as one bundle they created the institutional framework for
#
India going forward we could have simply dropped that completely and gone after a French Constitution
#
or Austrian Constitution or something or even an American Constitution we chose not to we
#
chose to take the Government of India Act of 1935 and then added subtracted and that's
#
Ambedkar's principle contribution to the way the process worked not the content the process
#
for instance first past the post first past the post is very much there in Government
#
of India Act although remember at that time they had separate electorates but within the
#
electorates it was first past the post within constituencies very English very American
#
it's not there in Continental Constitution it's not there in the Israeli Constitution
#
they're all about proportional representation but this is what constituency based first
#
past the post which isn't what has given us stability and not the instability that France
#
Italy and Israel you know constantly experience these ideas were taken and taken forward how
#
a controller or a general function very much there in 1935 I mean you know the way the
#
federal court was constituted or the Morris choir so all of those paraphernalia were very
#
well kept so that in fact on January 26 1950 there was no discontinuity and one of the
#
interesting things that the Constitution of India did was all prevailing earlier laws
#
will continue slowly we've changed them you know it took us a long time to change the
#
one on homosexuality but invariably we've been changing them over time but it was not
#
an abrupt thing to my mind that is the greatest achievement not jettisoning common law traditions
#
not jettisoning principles of equity traditions not jettisoning the Government of India Act
#
of 1935 completely but building on it has ensured that our Constitution sticks I've
#
lived in Latin America and in those countries every 10 years they change the Constitution
#
there's complete instability and chaos as a result you know this this has endured for
#
more than 70 years now and you know I mean it's been amended so often that people often
#
joke it's a periodical and not a book and you know you've kind of made the controversial
#
point in your book it's a conservative Constitution whereas a lot of other people would view it
#
as a fairly radical Constitution you know Gautam Bhatia had a recent book out with the
#
title transformative Constitution which sort of sums it up and I did an episode with political
#
scientist Rahul Verma who's written a book with Pradeep Chabbar called identity and ideology
#
and his point there was that this was a radical Constitution and that conservatives were
#
up in arms I mean he didn't call them conservatisms but the fault line here the ideological fault
#
line was one of statism where conservatives and I don't think he used that term because
#
he avoided those terms in the book but I'm using it but that conservatives felt that
#
society is fine as it is in the state should not try to do social engineering and reshape
#
it and the liberals or the radicals who shaped the Constitution felt that no society does
#
Yeah the issue really if you think about it despite all their pretensions to whatever
#
the British never abolished untouchability for instance technically untouchability existed
#
in British India having said that the most egregious forms of untouchability actually
#
existed in the native states in Travancore for instance not in British India and in British
#
India Ambedkar or Raba Dushinivasan or anyone got education got they were able to make their
#
impact and they had votes voting was given by property and education not by caste.
#
So the Government of India Act of 1935 gave as many Dalits who were educated and who had
#
property and paid taxes they gave them the vote it was not based on caste.
#
So it is true that abolition of untouchability was a radical act or seen as a radical act
#
by many people but I see it as part of the evolutionary process.
#
I see it as going back to Macaulay going back to Nan Kumar being hanged under Warren Hastings
#
he was a Brahmin and he was hacked and there was a big furor in Calcutta not so much whether
#
he was guilty or not guilty but whether it was okay to hang a Brahmin.
#
So each step it has moved on and so I see many of the so-called radical changes done
#
in 1950 as being built on the changes of 1909 of 1919 of 1935 and the continuous evolution
#
going back all the way to the Regulating Act and British India Act in the late 18th century
#
from then till now Queen's Proclamation of 1858 it talks about no discrimination based
#
on caste, creed or religion British didn't always follow it I'm not saying they followed
#
it but principle is enunciated and there is this gradual evolution.
#
So I disagree with both the people you've interviewed from the perspective of historical
#
process I'm not talking about every detail of content there are changes in content in
#
the Constitution which are quite radical but the process is the radical is step is a next
#
step from a step taken ten years earlier that's the way I see it.
#
We had limited franchise now we had adult franchise but at no stage by the way was franchise
#
based on gender or caste never it was based on property on tax payment and education.
#
So that was eliminated and just age was made anybody over 21 can vote and so that was I
#
see that as a step rather than as a radical break so it's the way you want to look at
#
the history of the evolution of the Constitution and just look at our neighbor two of our neighbors
#
Pakistan never kind of built on the Government of India Act of 1935 instead Ayub Khan came
#
up with something called basic democracy which was a completely new idea I'm not saying it's
#
a good idea bad idea but it was a radical and that never worked it worked for five years
#
and then that went another constitution came Sri Lanka they're troubling themselves going
#
back and forth between this and that Prime Minister presidential and never resolving
#
this and in fact creating it doesn't mean we don't amend of course we amend but we still
#
keep that continuity as we amend and that is the principle desiderata of conservatism.
#
Let's kind of go back to the chronology and sort of the Ram Mohan Roy conservatives as
#
you say and for three years during the transitional period 47 to 50 they are in powerful positions
#
we are shaping the new India and then in a sense for that for that strand of conservatism
#
it all falls apart Patel dies Prasad gets a titular post of president Parshad Tumdas
#
Tandon is knocked out of the party Govind Ballapant is CM of UP but he's kind of sidelined
#
as well and and it's all Nehru VP Menon their sort of Fabian socialist vision which is dominating
#
VK Menon not VP sorry VP Menon is a good guy yeah yeah sorry my bad VP Menon helped bring
#
all the states together of course and has written a fine book on it and you know and
#
like you point out there were some minor successes such as they did manage to stop Nehru from
#
carrying out collective farming 20 million people died in China we don't know how many
#
people died under Stalin in in Russia because they didn't keep track of killings collective
#
farming could have setback Indian agriculture could have could have created massive chaos
#
and there was a very strong lobby for it so Tantra party fought it relentlessly Charan
#
Singh who was in and out of the Congress party at that time I think he was in the Congress
#
party fought it relentlessly and somehow the caucus prevailed and Nehru's other advisors
#
who wanted to push us towards collective farming were kept back also remember at that time
#
property was a fundamental right there's obscene amendment hadn't yet come I had an episode
#
on the right to property and I agree with you that is the most obscene amendment hadn't
#
yet come and Nehru never Nehru disliked property being a fundamental right he disliked the
#
idea of justiciable compensation but he was gradualist enough not to tamper with it it
#
happened after his death so yes we started I think the high point of losing influence
#
was 56 55 our the Congress after which it became very much of a left-wing pro-soviet
#
pro-central planning pro-gigantism party on the economic side and on the political side
#
I think it remained one of a kind of tops-down fixes community development program he will
#
spend 500 crores you know some tops-down stuff without sufficient citizen participation or
#
grassroots involvements and making some compromises like linguistic states which they couldn't
#
fight off completely and it was a very sad time for the country very sad time and continued
#
for a long time unfortunately no and it was in an economic sense I admire Nehru for many
#
things and I think he was a great statesman but in economics he was a complete disaster
#
and this would definitely have been part of the reason that they weren't enough countervailing
#
influences and he sidelined Raj Gopalacharya and forced him to leave.
#
I actually hold his economic advisor as more responsible than even Nehru, Mala Nubes, V.K.R.V.
#
Rao, K.N. Raj, all these Sukhumoi Chakravarti, all these fellows who kept writing theoretical
#
papers sitting in Delhi school and who really sidelined the Shanois of the world and pushed
#
through some very absurd, I mean Mala Nubes actually believed that the economy was some
#
kind of a machine he had no time for price signals for you know consumer preferences
#
everything was a machine and it would work if you made so much steel you could make so
#
many cars if you made so many cars you could consume so much petrol and it's ironic because
#
Hayek's great essay the use of knowledge in society was written in I think 45 or 46
#
years ago there is no the idea that they didn't know that this was Zeitgeist I know people
#
like Ram Guha pushed this idea no no they were just you know following the fashions
#
Which I think broadly is true I mean no one knew what the Soviet Union actually was at
#
that time people sort of idealized it.
#
Yes they had put the Sputnik in space so people thought they were ahead of the US and the
#
West so there was that kind of but there was also I think brazen stupidity for which we
#
are all paying a price I mean the point is it's not a price that they only paid or their
#
families paid it's a price that the whole country has paid.
#
I want to move on to the Bankim Chandra Chatterjee school because it's sort of more relevant
#
to our times but before I do that let's talk about the last political gasp of the Ram Mohan
#
Roy school and of course you have the conservative caucus sort of dying out within the Congress
#
when you know Shastri dies Gulzari Lal Nanda leaves Maraji Desai leaves and by the end
#
of that decade by the end of the 60s swatantra party is also a spent force and your point
#
is that politically the swatantra party and by extension the Ram Mohan Roy school of conservatism
#
is doomed to fail politically why do you say that?
#
As a separate political movement institution or party I don't think it can succeed.
#
In democratic politics the issue that seems to matter most to voters is identity and if
#
at all there is an interest in economics the interest seems to be in redistributive goodie
#
giving patronage economics.
#
So this is the nature of the voter and this has been discussed even by Pericles I mean
#
this is not a new thing the nature of the voter is something we have to live with which
#
is one reason by the way many aristocracies resisted increasing the franchise I'm not
#
supporting it but I'm saying there was always this fear that now if you're going to vote
#
by identity like the republican party in America is about guns it is about abortion it's about
#
immigration it's not about taxes and trade those are secondary issues the conservative
#
party in England is about England and identity and so on and the labor is about free immigration
#
and more refugees and so on these are about identity issues it's not about and then the
#
ideology the economic ideology comes.
#
Now what is the identity issue that Swatantra or Ramon liberal can put up very difficult
#
it's too elitist you're not you don't appeal to any one caste or any religion or any linguistic
#
group you can't call yourself Telugu Desam you can't call yourself you know Muslim League
#
or a Kali Dal or you so therefore to get elected is not possible that's my point I'm trying
#
to make a party like this as a political party.
#
Now can it be a movement can it be a debating society after all Fabian society that left
#
wing group that did so much damage to the 20th century it was just a debating group
#
so you can influence without necessarily being a political party that's the point I'm trying
#
to make and to try and start a political party is a waste of time.
#
Now the Ramon school of conservatism sort of failed there at least in a political sense
#
but the strand of conservatism which did succeed was a Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay strand of
#
conservatism which no one expected and they're in charge now and particularly in the 50s
#
I don't think Jansang had more than three four five MPs whatever the communists always
#
had many more no one expected the Bankimchandra school to do so well politically and that's
#
in the 62 and 67 elections so Tantra had more seats than Jansang so but the reason
#
I think that's been able to chug along and increase its footprint frankly goes back to
#
Lajpat Rai it goes back to and even to Bhandarkar Bhandarkar speech talks about the fact that
#
hey you know Hindus better become anti caste we better get consolidation across castes
#
and this is also very prominent in Savarkar's writings so in fact Savarkar and Ambedkar
#
were together against Gandhi on the issue of caste a lot of people don't realize this
#
when they sort of and that in the initial years when I was in college for instance in
#
the 60s Jansang was a North Indian Hindu Hindi party and that to upper caste you know light
#
complexion to people kind of party it has changed its current leader is an OBC I mean
#
it's been able to do what in fact Kanshi Ram always used to say a communist party of
#
India is a joke all its Politburo are Brahmins and upper caste all the workers are Dalits
#
and that has been the problem with virtually all political parties in India that they have
#
been able to break that genuine Hindu consolidation that Lajpat Rai politically wanted and which
#
Bhandarkar intellectually argued for and Savarkar supported in his early days that has happened.
#
It's happened for a variety of reasons including I mentioned somewhere in the book the Ramayan
#
television series of what is this fellow this Ramanand Sagar in in in cultural history terms
#
he'll go down as important as Kamban or Tulsidas or Tyagaraja just wait and see when it's
#
written a hundred years from now the importance of what he did but for a variety of reasons
#
they have been able to but I think this is the single most important reason the identity
#
of a Samajwadi party is as of a Yadav party the identity of NCP is as of a Maratha party
#
for Kali Dal as a Jatsiq party this has managed to take the identity across castes and has
#
been able to get OBCs into it this was very much Lajpat Rai's vision and that has happened.
#
It's almost as if they have kind of systematically they've also looked at the ideas going back
#
to Bankim what is the original idea of Anandamath a dedicated group of sanyasis, bairagis who
#
are worshippers of the mother goddess who are committed to sacrifice and freedom.
#
Actually today's BJP vocabulary is uncannily similar Vande Mataram, mother India, spirit
#
of sacrifice, spirit of asceticism, anti-corruption very they've on the idea side they have gone
#
back to Bankim quite well on the organizational and people side they have been the most successful
#
party in terms of they have a Dalit president before that they even made muslim president
#
so they have kind of been able to do these things quite well and really I'm quite impressed
#
the adherence to Bankim and the ongoing Vivekananda is very important in Modi's vocabulary and
#
again the same ideas of sacrifice of motherland those ideas taken forward and mingled with
#
the political organization of how in a democratic polity does one get the OBC vote, how does
#
one get the Dalit vote, how does one get the tribal vote and long years of hard work particularly
#
the tribal votes is not recent.
#
I mean that work has been going on for 30-40 years in parts of tribal India and it's kind
#
finally paid off so there's still a problem with the south it's not clear that it's been
#
able to Karnataka is a bit of a one swallow not making a summer so we'll see if they'll
#
be able to push through in Telangana, Andhra, Kerala, Tamil Nadu.
#
But the overall effect has been very very interesting.
#
Also the base of the leadership the original Hindu Mahasabha leadership was really very
#
much Bengali and Punjabi and UP maybe and the original RSS leadership was you know Maharashtra
#
Vidarbha now you have Gujarat you have you know different parts of the country pushing
#
You have an OBC prime minister I'll sort of synthesize all this by quoting from your
#
book again which very eloquently expresses sort of the origin of the school of where
#
you say quote a frequently asked question is whether Hindu nationalism by its very Hindu
#
and very nationalistic nature can be a branch of conservatism at all.
#
This needs to be viewed contextually Abraham Lincoln who was perhaps the greatest American
#
president referred to the mystic gods of memory that bind people together.
#
And you combine this with the fact that the British conquered India and pretty openly
#
took the position that they had conquered it from predominantly Muslim rulers.
#
It became clear that non-Muslims in India taking into account that the very term Hindu
#
was an evolving one had no option but to seek a renaissance if they were to sustain themselves
#
as a community with shared mutual loyalty rather than as atomized splinters.
#
Bankim and Lajpat Rai along with several others realized that a shared Hindu cultural identity
#
could be the basis of overcoming vertical and horizontal boundaries among Hindus like
#
caste, stop-court and you later said they could then be a band of brothers.
#
And partly like you said this has finally taken shape in the sense that more Dalits
#
voted for the BJP than the Congress in both the 2014 and the 2019 elections.
#
And in UP there might be as many Dalits voting for BJP as for BSP.
#
That's quite an achievement. Whatever activists on the outside might say it seems the Dalits
#
of India have voted with their feet for the moment.
#
Now I want to come back to a slightly more sort of troubling element there's a later
#
The question that arises, quote, the question that arises is whether the pre-independence
#
Hindu nationalist movement was a conservative one or not.
#
It certainly had a conservative flavor to it, but it also had a revivalist and rejectionist
#
And in a different part of the book you talk about how the danger in these kinds of nationalistic
#
movements can be in othering certain people, the same way the Nazis did for example and
#
you bring up that comparison and you say that othering could become something pathological
#
and could descend into something which is very far from conservatism.
#
Can you sort of elaborate on that?
#
You see, when you talk about revivalist, if you say that only Gupta era or Chola era stuff
#
matters, the last 200 years of British era is all hell, is all poison, all to be forgotten,
#
That is revivalism, you know, that is not conservatism.
#
The second thing in terms of othering is really band of brothers is we are together, we have
#
a shared culture, we have a shared community, a shared territory, whatever.
#
Does it require that we move to the next step of disliking another band of brothers?
#
And so that's called othering really, essentially to build a kind of political platform on a
#
negative kind of trajectory.
#
And it's not unusual, it happens.
#
You could be a proud German and you could have included the Jews as part of proud Germans.
#
After all, between 1900 and 1930, although there were 1% of the population, 30% of the
#
Nobel prizes won by Germans were won by Jewish Germans.
#
They never thought of themselves.
#
But if you choose to other them, then you end up with a pathological situation which
#
in the long run can be detrimental, can come back like a Basmasura, it can come back to
#
And this is a problem that a lot of nationalist conservative movements have.
#
Parnell was, you know, look at Parnell, how he was othered.
#
He was a great Irish Catholic leader, but the church went against him because he had
#
an affair or something, some purely personal reason you othered the man and then the Irish
#
lost 50 years that they could have gotten their home rule earlier under Parnell.
#
So these things, you have to be very careful, you have to be extremely careful that you
#
And that's why revivalism and being anti-British and anti-McCauley Putra and anti-British rule
#
and anti-English ends up also becoming anti-Western civilization, which is the source of so much
#
modern good stuff for us.
#
You should not other, you know, anyone because in doing that, you lose.
#
is not a fool to read the Upanishad, you know, he's reaching out to all that is great in
#
We should be like that and not other, either the West or Muslims or anyone.
#
And there's a passage in your book which seemed to me that I would have agreed with if you
#
had written it in, say, 2002 when Vajpayee was prime minister, but I cannot agree with
#
it today, which is, quote, almost imperceptibly, the face of Hindu nationalism changed.
#
One was the opposition to English and the attempts to force Hindi and reluctant states.
#
Traces of obscurantism associated with the revivalist ideology were quietly jettisoned.
#
The Ram Rajya Parishad's opposition to changes to the Hindu marriage and divorce code would
#
Hindu nationalism has acquired a chic contemporary age.
#
And even if this might have been true in 2002 when Vajpayee was PM, it seems to me that
#
it's actually shifted the other way today in the sense that cow is back as an issue.
#
And now that they're done with 370, they're at some point going to move on to the uniform
#
civil code, which in a sense is, you know, the Hindu code bill issue all over again expressed
#
differently as resentment against the other, you know, applied to everyone.
#
Similarly, you know, lynchings are on the rise.
#
You have talk of, you know, I mean, things like love jihad and all were issues in the
#
I had an episode a while back with Akar Patel on the intellectual foundations of Hindutva,
#
which in retrospect, I think both of us said things which were other naive.
#
But one of the points he made in that was that it seems to him that a lot of Hindutva
#
seems to be again, like you pointed out about the other.
#
It's directed at someone, you know, whether it's cow slaughter directed at Muslims, whether
#
it's UCC directed at Muslims or at appeasement to the Muslims that the Congress carried out.
#
And that allegation, of course, is correct.
#
But it's all about the other.
#
What are the positive things that this I think I think, you know, the the best writings of
#
Savarkar or Shamprasad, it's not about the other at all.
#
It's about reforming and consolidating Hindus.
#
It's very little reference to the other actually, Hindutva has a fair amount of reference to
#
I mean, I've read it and but the emphasis is really let's fix ourselves.
#
Let Hindus get, you know, Sangat and within Hindus that let's let's get rid of caste.
#
Let's get rid of egregious.
#
The other part is kind of there, but it's not.
#
And as I say, it can always become bigger.
#
The question is, if it becomes bigger, what are the risks?
#
There's not I don't believe there's only one other.
#
One other is the West, because when you reject English and Macaulay Putras and when you reject
#
a lot of those things, you are saying that we will be a kind of a Hindu thing without
#
recourse to any interaction dependence of the West.
#
And the other is Muslim.
#
I think the second one post 9 11 has gotten a little confused with also this jihadism
#
and international terrorism, and of course, Pakistan sponsored terrorism and so on.
#
So that's become a very confused area of of dealing with it.
#
And I don't think anybody has the right answers.
#
I just saw the other day that there is a head of some Christian association in Kerala was
#
written a long letter about love jihad, saying it's all about Christian girls who are being
#
So this is now, you know, and the attack on the Christian churches in Sri Lanka and so
#
This has become a bit of a difficult thing to deal with.
#
One can only hope and I have mentioned that there are some good signs.
#
There are some lots of worrisome signs, some good signs.
#
Modi being the chief guest at the International Sufi Convention in Delhi is being very prominent
#
in the Bori Convention in Indore.
#
And if you noticed in this Houston thing, there was a large number of bodies in that
#
So Bori NRIs also obviously are being courted as part of this.
#
I think there is a need to make that connect.
#
I think the most promising area, which I hope they will, is music, because music is an area
#
where there has been a lot of kind of co-mingling and a lot of emergence of a band of brothers
#
spirit across Hindus and Muslims, not just within Hindus or within Muslims.
#
It has been one of those things.
#
We have in Tamil a song, I am the song, I am the feeling in the song, I am the person
#
who has made you, the singer, sing.
#
So this is Shiva, who is the Lord of Madurai City.
#
And we believe that still, if you are a good devoted person, you can still see, suddenly
#
get to see Shiva in Madurai City, he's always there.
#
So he is singing this song and the person who wrote this, this is a 1970s song, is a
#
guy called Kamu Sharif, a Muslim lyricist and poet.
#
So my point is, if you can go to the Sufi convention, then you should now also push
#
along these things, because otherwise the narrative, including what is bothering me,
#
It is no longer just an Indian problem.
#
It's got international dimensions in terms of this othering that we need to, and I am
#
hopeful, I somehow feel that the two countries where we might also get constructive response
#
from Muslim intellectuals will be India and Indonesia, where they will come up with new
#
path-breaking ways to reach out to create band of brothers, affinities.
#
I am very intrigued by this Pasmanda Muslim movement, do you know about it?
#
This is a movement in UP and Bihar of OBC Muslims.
#
So in a sense, they are saying these Ashraf, Arab, Persian descent, light complexion, Muslim
#
aristocracy, they have not helped us, they have just taken care of their sinecures.
#
So let us do our own movement, look for reservations, which is what everybody in India looks for
#
and a few other goodies.
#
But in the process, what are they doing?
#
They are admitting that they are converts of OBC castes, which is what, in fact, the
#
Indutwa people want them to admit.
#
So it is happening maybe for a totally different reason, but it's, so I am this girl Salma
#
who writes, she's a Tamil feminist writer, she's a Muslim feminist writer, very interesting.
#
So there are things like that that are happening, which give me a sense of optimism.
#
But yes, we could, the descent from high watermark 1930 to 1940 was just 10 years, doesn't take
#
If you make a few wrong choices, you could, hopefully again, it's the constitution, it's
#
the inherent good sense of the Indian people, which will prevail.
#
In fact, one of the great lessons of the 20th century was that one must be able to tell
#
the difference between an ideology in its utopian form, as you've pointed out, and what
#
And we've seen that with the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, or whatever, where you still
#
have people who defend communism and say that, they implemented it wrong.
#
So my question to you then is, let's look at this school of conservatism, the Bankimchandar
#
school of conservatism, with the same skepticism, and leave aside what are in theory, the sensible
#
aspects of it, and look at what's happening in practice.
#
Because what I see in practice is when Modi is a master of optics, what I see in practice
#
is that in terms of economics, his government is as statist as any government in our history.
#
In fact, many of the things he's done, like demonetization and the botched implementation
#
of GST, feels like it's right out of Indira Gandhi's book.
#
I always say he's her successor.
#
You know, this is where I keep making the argument.
#
We need to appeal to the non-statist free market elements within the BJP.
#
Because there are Luddite elements also.
#
They don't want modern technology, but they don't want GM crops.
#
There's a whole lot of elements within this broad umbrella of Hindu nationalism, which
#
we need to neutralize and appeal to those elements, which are...
#
That's why I said, if you read that again, there is something about technical thing.
#
Shake contemporary edge.
#
Now, this meeting with Facebook, this interested in Silicon Valley, these are the things that
#
It's very tough to push it because the other side, which wants GM crops to be banned, which
#
wants no privatization, they're playing the same game of using their thing.
#
In general, it's been disappointing that this dispensation has not been as market friendly,
#
I think, as many of us expected it to be.
#
And I didn't really even finish my question because the second part of the first part,
#
of course, is an economics have been completely strategist, not even just as market friendly
#
as you and I would have liked, but literally Indira Gandhi level strategist.
#
But also in terms of society, our society is being polarized very deeply.
#
And I don't think that's an exaggeration by what is really going on.
#
I think it's an exaggeration.
#
In my travels, I don't see, I think it's a very Bombay, Delhi view.
#
When I travel around the country, I don't see any great change from the past.
#
And I really wonder if, in fact, there is extraordinary new levels of violence or new
#
levels of tension, because it seems to me pretty much the same as it was before.
#
And India has never been an easy country to govern.
#
And it's never been a nonviolent country despite Mahatma Gandhi's best efforts.
#
So it's there, but I don't, the narrative that somehow it has gone up dramatically in
#
the last five, six years, I'm very skeptical of that narrative.
#
For instance, take this, some guy has gone to a magistrate and got some sedition case
#
against some writers in some obscure court in Bihar.
#
Now this kind of thing has been happening in India for the last eight years.
#
No, no, I have in fact written about the sedition law in columns long before this government
#
But I think we'll agree to disagree because I think if you just look at the number of
#
the lynching numbers, for example, and the way the discourse has been so polarized and
#
has become so shrill, I think, but we can agree to disagree.
#
No, no, I think maybe I have a longer memory or whatever.
#
But have you heard of Kedavendmani?
#
Kedavendmani in 1968, 40 or Dalit agricultural workers were burnt alive in a hut in Tanjavur
#
Now these kinds of things have been there and no one was punished, by the way.
#
Journal of inquiry came up with some total anodyne reported.
#
This is under a DMK government, not even a Congress government.
#
But this is the, I remember so many of these things and I say, Malayana, Meerut, Muradabad.
#
In fact, this fellow who has now become governor of Kerala, what's his name?
#
He makes an interesting statement.
#
I was watching him on YouTube the other day, there have been no riots for some time.
#
Yeah, that's his perspective, you know, but which is actually interesting, do you want
#
to measure by riots and it's kind of horrifying idea because, you know, the moment you say
#
these things, you'll have one.
#
But we'll leave this particular issue there, let the listener decide, I've taken a lot
#
of your time, so I'll end with sort of a couple of more questions.
#
One question is that once you get into politics, your imperatives, your incentives drive you
#
in a particular direction and typically what happens is you're driven by the will to power.
#
For example, Amit Shah is of course a master political strategist and the way he's done
#
his mergers and acquisitions, got politicians from all parties, regardless of their founding
#
ideology, the way he's put together caste coalitions, you know, going after non-Yadav
#
OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits and so on and UP, very masterful, but driven by the will to
#
power and not by any ideology per se.
#
So then the question is that given that political imperatives leave you with only one aim, which
#
is what is the best way to come to power and nothing else matters, not issues of virtue
#
or what is the right thing to do or what is good for society, but simply how do I win
#
Is that something that you see as a problem and isn't that a more core cause of why Swatantra
#
I think it's a complete violation of the principles of Rajadharma, Thiruvalluvar certainly would
#
not have approved of it.
#
But all that is theory, right?
#
I mean, I mean, ruling righteously is not theory.
#
Who has ruled righteously?
#
I mean, I don't like the word rule because they should serve, but who has ruled righteously?
#
Look, you go back to the American constitution, they are saying more perfect union.
#
They are not saying the perfect union.
#
We are not saying that we can get it all correct, but the intention and the attempt has to be
#
in the direction of righteousness and not in the direction of pure pursuit of power.
#
And that is, that is a danger.
#
It's a danger that all kings, all quasi kings would be kings, wannabe kings are tempted
#
by and in that process, will they adopt means that are not just moderately bad, but extremely
#
That's the question you're asking, right?
#
And we've seen this again and again and again in democratic politics when somebody says,
#
yeah, that might be a good idea, but it's not a vote winner.
#
Oh, that's a vote loser.
#
You know, this idea that we will only pursue vote winners and discard vote losers is in
#
But when you then say, I don't mind pursuing vote winners, but I'll do it through bribery,
#
Shri Senary, corruption, violence.
#
That's when it becomes a problem.
#
I don't think we've gotten there, the country is not there.
#
In the sense that we had something like demonetization, which was horrible economics, but good politics
#
and carried out for political reasons, because the calculation was that one, your opposition
#
parties, funds get stunted and two, the sense of schadenfreude that the poor feel about
#
the rich suffering more than them will help them win the next UP election.
#
And it was a landslide.
#
You know, again, I mean, we, after the fact, it looks, if they had lost, we'd have said
#
demonetization caused them the loss.
#
My point is after these electoral analysis about why somebody wins or loses after the
#
My point of bringing this up was to say that the impetus behind a particular, that particular
#
economic policy, and my contention is for most economic policies that get carried out
#
by the government is a political impetus, not an economic impetus, and that's a problem.
#
And that is the nature of democracy.
#
I don't think you can stand up in Britain and say NHS is inefficient.
#
It doesn't matter whether you're conservative or labor or whatever.
#
So yes, ultimately in a democracy, politics predominates and not economics.
#
And that has been one of the sadder things about the 1991 reforms is that it wasn't sold
#
to the people as something that's good.
#
To this day, I don't think it's economic reform or movement towards markets has been sold
#
In fact, it's remarkable that actually the best thing in terms of policy that happened
#
to this country, which got 300 million people out of poverty is something that Rahul Gandhi
#
actually disowns and wants to walk back to earlier socialist times, which kept millions
#
in poor, which is, you know, the state of the opposition is so dismal.
#
Because I think the politics of patronage may be very important for their votes.
#
Exactly the point I was making.
#
I made this point many years ago to one of my friends at the Congress, 20, 30 years ago,
#
I said, yeah, as far as I can make out, the less educated a person is, the less wealthy
#
a person is, other things being equal caste, gender, et cetera, the more likely that person
#
is to work for Congress party.
#
And therefore I said, you guys have a vested interest in keeping people less educated and
#
I mean, stupid reverse causality, I admit, it's not a good argument, but I was making
#
These are very complicated things.
#
They don't, for instance, would you want Hispanic Americans to get integrated if you are a Democratic
#
party leader in America?
#
You want to highlight their separateness because then they vote for you.
#
Otherwise they might vote Republican.
#
So these are very complicated things and it's a curse of democracy that we have to deal
#
I think economic reform, we have to keep fighting for it on only two, three basis.
#
One, it is morally the right thing to do, Raja Dharma, not to interfere in economic
#
activities of your citizens.
#
Two, consequentially, all these Asian countries who adopted it have done better than us.
#
Therefore you will do better.
#
And three, if a constituency keeps getting built for it, which is still very small, presumably,
#
and not a constituency for freebies, I think you might.
#
But the third one is very tough, it's very tough.
#
Politics always trumps economics.
#
And also they look at the facts, factors are somehow lost, factors watched by lost.
#
Probably our two best prime ministers.
#
Wait a minute, you know, economic reform, Vajpayee did the maximum amount of privatizations.
#
He even had a disinvestment ministry, he lost.
#
So the conclusion you come to, it's a very strange conclusion, but you come to it that
#
the voters are supreme and how does one deal with that?
#
Democracy is not an unmixed blessing.
#
It has its problems, as Churchill says, it's better than other systems, but it's not necessarily
#
Now I'll let you go shortly, I'll release you from the fetters of this drab podcast
#
But before I ask my final question, I just want a word for my listeners.
#
I had four pages of notes for this episode and I'm through just two of them.
#
Among the things we could not discuss is the development of Islam in India, how much of
#
it was around conservative lines, how much was not, Jerry's assertion that Jinnah started
#
off as a conservative and ended as a radical, then there are a couple of really good chapters
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on culture, on society, on aesthetics and education.
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So the book is far richer than this.
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Even this episode might have given you a sense of, so please go out and buy the book.
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But now for my last question, which is a question I ask all my guests about whatever the subject
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Can I come in for one, particularly the culture section, I think is something that I spent
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a fair amount of time and effort on because the problem in today's academia, both in North
#
America and in England and in the continent and in India is that it's dominated by Marxist
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postmodernists and Freudians who have kind of dismissed the idea of an Indian culture
#
as upper caste, hegemonic, patriarchal, this, that and the other using their vocabulary
#
that postmodernists like, which I don't understand and I choose not to understand.
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And I've taken a very comprehensive and a very head on attack on that in defending the
#
idea of an Indian culture.
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So I do hope readers will, we'll, we'll get to that and spend time on that now.
#
My final question is speaking as a conservative, what gives you hope and what gives you despair
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about the next 20 years in India?
#
I think basically the residual Marxism, residual socialism as an intellectually coherent and
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respectable doctrine will go away.
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I think it will go away.
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That gives me hope because as long as it exists, it's always a danger and a bad thing.
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I think in the economics area, either because of a crisis or whatever reason, the philosophy
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of supporting markets and being market friendly will willy-nilly reassert itself.
#
I think Indian culture is thriving on that score.
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I think Indian social change is going along fairly okay lines, issues like Sabarimala
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and so on, which kind of distract us, but in general it is, it is moving along the directions.
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Now what am I worried about?
#
I think one worry is that we continue to not recognize intellectually at least in sufficient
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numbers, the continuity in our history, particularly the importance of the British Raj as an important
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constructive positive intervention in Indian history.
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If we don't, then we run the risk of doing stupid things.
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That is a big risk that worries me again.
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I see it in our neighboring states.
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I see it in all of the former colonies of the British and African.
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Naipaul talks about it when he talks about mimic men.
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That's what he's talking about.
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The jettisoning of that is, and it could happen.
#
It could happen because there is so little understanding and so little defense of it.
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In fact, the most popular books recently in Indian history have been attacking Robert
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Clive and attacking East India Company without, you know, very popular, immensely popular
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among Indians, middle classes and upwardly middle class.
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That's a big worry I have.
#
Then I do have a concern that which you expressed that, you know, essentially we have moved
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far ahead politically without moving sufficiently economically or socially.
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The same issues that Rana Dey raised 120 years ago, please let us not go for, you know, quick
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political freedom without concomitant economic and social change.
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That is still the curse that we are living with.
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And that means you never know.
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We could have some very strange and bizarre political behavior.
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And we should always be very careful.
#
The First Republic of India is 69 years old, yes.
#
And you know, it is very important that we collectively say, hey, we want to be around
#
in the same fashion more or less 69 years from now.
#
And 1776 to what, 1860, it was how many years, 84 years, a major crisis happened in the history
#
of the other great constitutional republic that we are aware of.
#
So these are dangerous times in the history of any republic.
#
We are no longer young or a middle-aged republic.
#
And middle-aged is when, you know, as you know, cholesterol and diabetes and all these
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things hit people and that could be true for a society too.
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So that gives me sleepless nights.
#
On these wise words, Jerry, thank you so much for coming on the show.
#
I learned a lot reading your book and talking to you.
#
If you enjoyed listening to the show, hop on over to your nearest bookstore online or
#
offline and pick up the Indian conservative by Jaythirtha Rao, better known as Jerry Rao.
#
You can't unfortunately follow him on Twitter or Instagram or any such thing because the
#
man very wisely is not on social media.
#
You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in, thinkprakati.com
#
The Scene and the Unseen is supported by the Takshashila Institution, an independent think
#
tank based in Bangalore.
#
The Takshashila Institution has postgraduate courses in public policy starting January.
#
Hop on over to takshashila.org.in for more details.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
How many times have you caught yourself Googling stuff on health and wondering if it's the
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We're all in the content business now.
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Let's not call it news, TV, radio, etc., etc.
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It's all content and we're in the middle of this weirdly exciting phase where all the
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borders and lines that have been drawn over decades has been swept away by this lovely
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stuff about advertising media, content, and the whole goddamn circus surrounding it.
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I'm Varun Duggirala, co-founder and content chief at The Glitch, and this is my new podcast,
